


Blight

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Denial of Feelings, Government Agencies, Great Depression, Light Angst, No Sex, Statute of Secrecy (Harry Potter), Wizarding Politics (Harry Potter), Wizarding apathy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 15:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20312128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: It's 1936. The Depression has set in so deep, Graves can hardly see how the No-Majs will ever dig themselves out. That hadn't mattered to him at all before. Before, he hadn't known Credence.(A somewhat Of Mice and Men-ish AU)





	Blight

The boss's wife had been watching them through narrowed eyes ever since she rode in on the back of her husband’s truck that morning, one of each of her towheaded sons tucked into the crook of an arm. She had a wide, red face burnt redder by the sun and blue eyes which she shielded with the flat of her hand whenever she stopped to look back at them. At times she would kick up a clod of dirt, slap one of the boys on the back of the head, and then glower in whichever direction they happened to be in. Percival did his best to steer them both well out of her path. Her looking was beginning to unnerve him. The last time they’d attracted attention like that had been in the good camp down in Stewartville. Twenty miles and five days hence from here and with a warning delivered from the end of a loaded shotgun not to come back.

At his side he felt Credence stiffen over a crate of oranges. It was for him, he thought, that he was truly worried. Credence attracted the worst kind of attention like a corpse attracts flies.

“It’s all right,” Percival said soothingly. “It’s just the wife, but she won’t bother us if you keep working like you have been.”

Obedient as ever, Credence stooped to hoist the crate over his shoulder. Percival watched his slow shuffle over to the back of the truck. His cracked boots kicked up soil as he went along, leaving a trail of disturbed earth between them. Around the other side of the truck, the boss's wife held up a ladle and a bucket of water. He watched her lips move, Credence’s head bob as he loaded the crate. He would hesitateto take the drink even though it had been offered to him. Some learned habit, Percival thought. Still, it would only make her glare harder if he refused.

It was a hot day. Different hot from home in the city, where the heat got stuck in between the masses of buildings and brick and steel and cement and would hang on you thick like syrup. This heat was piercing, cut through bone. Percival felt as though it had reached into his innermost organs and was slowly broiling them. He could see the boss's wife frowning. Credence stood with his hands in loose fists at the side of the truck, an awkward distance away from the ladle.

“Ya ain’t thirsty?”

His eyes clung desperately onto Percival as he drew close.

“Sure he is,” said Percival genially.

He watched the frown slide off the woman’s wide face. Her freckles nearly disappeared into her ruddy skin. She was plain of face, he thought, in the way so many No-Maj women were now. No makeup, simple sackcloth dress. She dipped the ladle back into the bucket as he laid a hand on Credence’s shoulder and guided him forward. Gentle shoves, but shoves nonetheless. No-Majs had funny ideas about physical contact between men. They had learned this lesson well, back in Stewartville.

“Go on, boy,” said Percival. “It’s hot. You have to drink.”

“Hotter’n hell,” agreed the boss's wife. Her blue eyes fixed themselves on the top of the boy’s head as he stooped to drink from the ladle in her hand. “He’s a good worker, though, your boy. Never seen ‘im stop nor complain once all day.”

At this unexpected praise, Credence coughed and jumped back. He held his shoulders near his ears as though to protect the sides of his head, wiping his mouth with the back of his dirty hand.

“He’s my sister’s boy,” lied Percival quickly. “Lost their farm back east.”

“Sure, hell, it’s bad luck all over.”

“Like a plague,” Percival said.

“I had a cousin like him,” said the boss's wife, suddenly soft. She held up the ladle again until Credence’s bowed head returned to it. He drank in small sips, though his forehead and neck were slicked with perspiration. “He were slow but always a good boy. Dropped off the back of a tractor when he were three years old. Never the same after.”

Whoever had run Credence down had worked with about the grace and efficiency of a tractor, Percival thought darkly. He watched as the boy withdrew, wiping his mouth again with the back of his smudged wrist, and sighed. What this woman had intended with all her looking, it no longer seemed to hold any threat. Her lips parted crookedly over her teeth as she slid the ladle back into the bucket. She stared at Credence now with a naked pity that drove him into Percival’s shadow, his chin tucked nearly into his neck.

“He’s shy,” Percival said. “First time away from home. It’s been difficult for him.”

“Well, he ain’t alone in that, hell. We seen more o’ y’all these past years’n ever. Shabbier’n shabbier, too. Ya hafter wonder, Lord, will it never end?”

“Mhm.”

An idea seemed to strike her suddenly. Her face was drawn tight with anticipation as she turned to Credence, whose only acknowledgment of the unwanted attention was to scuff the toe of his boot into the dirt.

“Why don’t ya pick you some of these oranges for your breakfast. Take ‘em with ya. Sure, it’s better’n beans. Ain’t enough of these Oakie kids gittin’ their vitamins these days. Y’all don’t eat fresh.”

“That’s very kind,” said Percy smoothly. He laid his hand across the back of Credence’s neck, felt him stiffen beneath it. “And very generous of you. It’s been a good while since we’ve had anything fresh, hasn’t it, Credence?”

“Yes, sir,” said Credence softly.

“Young man can’t live on pork’n beans,” said the boss’s wife decisively. She watched in narrow-eyed satisfaction as Credence slipped an orange into his pocket. “Go on an’ gitcha another. Y’all worked hard today. Hell, I ain’t never seen nobody work so hard in this heat. Y’all can come back tomorrow. Take you as many oranges as you like.”

They departed with a small sack of oranges which Percival insisted on carrying, the boss’s wife waving graciously at their retreating backs. The walk to camp was a short one. Blessedly so, as the sun was still blazing and wouldn’t set for another hour, when the whole valley would sigh in relief at its absence. Only the breeze had picked up now, cooling the sweat beading his neck and brow and rustling the leaves of the eucalyptus trees that lined their walk. A sure sign of a chill evening. Sometimes the nights were even too cold. He refused to think about what would happen to Credence once he was no longer around to charm their bedrolls to keep them warm in the night, or to encourage him to drink from the ladle when the boss’s wife offered.

What he really wanted was to lessen the load now as he had been doing all week with every crate and sack to pass through their fingers. Though the weight of the oranges was beginning to cut into the sore muscles in his shoulder, it wouldn’t be safe to try anything until they had left the field entirely. Percival swiped at his brow and sighed. He was aware of Credence shuffling dully at his side. Neither said a word.

Only after they had reached the fork that split the dirt road between the highway to the right and the row of worker’s cabins to the left did Credence stop.

“Mr. Graves?”

His fist twitched in the corner of Percival’s line of vision. He dropped the sack of oranges into the dirt and pressed the damp hair from his forehead with the palm of his hand.

“You’re not slow,” he said.

For a moment Credence stood there flexing his fist and mulling this over, and then he asked miserably, “You don’t think so?”

“No, I don’t think so. But it’s easier for you if she thinks you are. She seems to like you better for it.”

He had intended to bolster Credence’s failing confidence with these words, but the boy looked as wretched as ever as he picked up the trail back to camp.

It occurred to Percival as he was tying their haul of oranges to a rafter in the ceiling of their cabin that his real worry for Credence had been given shape by the boss’s wife. When she said ‘Lord, will it never end’, he had felt the sentiment as though she had wrenched it from the space between his ribs. For Percival it would end. The odd ache that had plagued him since he first met Credence in the boxcar of a speeding train had crystallised. Nothing would change for Credence or for any of the starving No-Majs after Percival had returned to his tailored wool suits and restaurant dinners in the city at the close of this mission. He realised he was using his guilt-ridden fantasies of Credence starving to death, getting himself kicked out of camp again, or shot, to put off facing him.

He busied himself sweeping the dust back out the front door. It was painful not being able to snap the radio on, but he resisted. He waited until he had crossed the length of the room back to the corner they optimistically called “the kitchen” to take the radio down from the shelf and twist the dial. Everything was better with music on, Percival thought. His mother had always said that. He had to admit that he was beginning to enjoy No-Maj jazz almost as much as Credence clearly did. There was something sweet and mournful about their arrangements, some hazy late-summer optimism that seemed to affect them both equally. Only beneath the cover of music had he ever witnessed Credence smile.

He pretend he was alone now as he stacked their breakfast plates. The camp cabins had been advertised on Kinley Ranch’s billboard as “insulated” and “furnished”. What this really meant were four wooden walls lined with newspaper, a small wooden table in the kitchen-corner, a single wooden chair at the table, and two folding cots that reminded Percival forcefully of rainy nights in Germany in ’18. They fastened their belongings to the roof rafters to keep them free of bugs, but even so, Percival had flicked a mean-looking spider from his socks that morning.

It was Credence who had crushed the spider, he remembered, under the heel of his boot.

“I don’t think I’ll go back out, Mr. Graves,” he said from where he was sitting rigidly on the edge of his bed. Percival watched his fingers twist around the corner of his rough woollen blanket.

“You’ll miss supper.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

It was an obvious lie betrayed openly by the growling of Credence’s stomach. He tore his eyes from Percival’s and bunched the corner of the blanket into a ball in the palm of his fist.

“I’ll bring you a plate,” said Percival. “You shouldn’t go hungry just because of a silly comment from a silly woman.”

There was something that he was not understanding. He could read that sentiment as well in the blackness of Credence’s eyes following him back out the door and down the front steps. Maybe he was being deliberately obtuse. The part of him that avoided asking the most probing questions was afraid of what rot he might find beneath the thin plaster of Credence’s scowling face and wringing hands.

What Percival knew, he knew from observation only. Credence had twitchy habits, shifty, fed right into every stereotype about the poor Okie migrant that Percival had ever heard. When they waited in the crowd of eager bums to be picked out for work, he stood stooped and limp-limbed like an old flag on a pole. Half-mast. There was something torn about his pale, angular face, something fly-like about his black eyes, always buzzing from one corner to the next, searching for escape routes, sizing up bullies in everyone from their fellow workers to the boss’s youngest, a boy of no more than five or six.

He walked heavily, always hunched. His denim overalls flapped around the narrow flesh of his hips and legs like the canvas tents they’d passed all along the side of the road on their way in to Kinley ranch. In the boss's eyes, he was the exact opposite of Percival, who had managed to have his blue jeans tailored by the same wizarding tailor in the secret back room at Bergdorf’s before departing on this mission. Without Percival, they would have had no work and no food and no shelter. Might not even have made it out this far West, and certainly not past the policemen at the border. He knew this. He knew that Credence knew it, too.

He decided finally that he would give the boy his own dinner, as well. And then he would ask his questions.

Credence was lying on his cot when Percival returned with two heaping plates of beans, potato, and fried pork. He made no greeting but laid his hand over a curl of orange peel on the blanket beside him as though to hide it.

“I ate one of the oranges,” he said.

“Taste your own blood, sweat, and tears in its juice, or are you still moping?” If there was anything sharp in the look Credence gave him as he took his plate, Percival chose to ignore it. “You have to eat more than oranges,” he said. “I mean, look at you. I can see all your bones just standing here. They practically have personalities of their own now. You’ll have to start naming them if you don’t fatten up soon.”

“I’m sick of beans.”

It was the first complaint Percival had ever heard him utter. He stood blinking as Credence pushed a pile of beans around on the plate which he had balanced across his knees.

“Anyway,” he said, in a prickly, brittle tone, “you can’t name bones. It’s a sin to ascribe personhood to anything that doesn’t have a soul.”

“You’re religious.”

“I’m excommunicated,” said Credence without looking up. “I’m living in a state of mortal sin. But I haven’t forgotten everything.”

“Catholic?”

“No, not them.”

Percival thought briefly of his former commitment not to probe deeply and decided that it was a product of failed logic. Too much time had been wasted chatting about the weather and the best camps and the best boxcars to ride in. He had been closing in on the source of the mass disturbances for two weeks now. It was, at best, a matter of days before he had his culprit, and then he would have to go back to New York. Thinking about his inevitable departure was still upsetting. He set his plate on the table and fiddled with the radio dial to find the channel where the No-Maj president liked to give talks. Maybe Seraphina Picquery should give up an evening of her week to go on the wizarding radio, he thought. Might help reduce the friction that had been mounting like static electricity throughout the country.

He tried again, cautiously: “Is your father religious?”

Even with the radio on, there was no masking the dull scrape of Credence’s spoon against his tin plate. It stilled briefly as he considered his answer.

“I don’t know.”

“Never asked?”

“Don’t know him,” said Credence. He returned his attention with a fixed intensity to the dinner plate on his lap, leaving Percival to digest this new information as the radio chimed in announcement of the evening address.

A deep silence settled between them after the president began to speak, Credence scraping his spoon systematically through a pile of food and shovelling it into his mouth. Percival sat at the table before the radio and pointedly did not look. He no longer needed to to know that Credence was hunched over his plate with his shoulders around his ears, as rigid as a day-old body. His table manners betrayed unspoken details about the nature of his upbringing. He seemed never to have sat at a table before to consume a meal and used a spoon for everything, at which Percival assumed that he could not have been accustomed to meat. If Percival had to guess, he had pinned his theories on an orphanage of some sort. The lack of a father in the picture was only further evidence, he thought.

He said, “What about your mother? Priestess?”

“Yes,” said Credence between his final two spoonfuls. “I guess you could put it like that.”

“…The preliminary response to the Red Cross appeal has been generous….”

The voice of the No-Maj President droned tinnily through the speakers of his pocket radio. Credence set his spoon onto his plate. His posture had changed, Percival noticed. He had lifted his jaw just so, giving him the surly air of a defiant child.

“My mother hunts witches.”


End file.
